Ian Douglas joined the Telegraph in 1999 when the web was young and simple, and is now head of digital production. He writes about technology, science, the internet and beekeeping.

The British Library looks to the e-book future

Go downstairs in the British Library through a few doors marked 'Private', punching in a few code numbers as you go, and you'll reach a room filled with large structures covered with dust sheets. There are cages full of shelves at the edges, a few computers, some lines of tape to keep the builders away and ring binders full of instructions.

The British Library Photo: Jim Winslet

Carefully lift off one of the dust sheets and you'll see a metal frame. At your left hand is another computer screen and, slightly above your head, two 21 megapixel Canon digital cameras are fixed to focus on two metal plates in the midst of a system of levers and tubes below. Welcome to the digitisation room.

Here, until very recently, around a quarter of the library's collection 19th century literature in English were being scanned into e-book form for display upstairs at the electronic reader exhibit where you can try out three of the popular models and decide for yourself if you're ready to give up reading off wood pulp.

In front of each machine an operator would sit, watching as the levers and suction devices carefully turned 25 million pages, 1,500 pages per hour. Take a book from the crate, place it in the cradle and press go. Hiss, slide, click, scan. Look at the preview, hit the button if there's anything wrong. Hiss, slide, click, scan. If the page is too big, the operator moves over to the large flatbed scanner, scans the large page, the front and back covers of the book and makes a note of the page number. The software inserts the image in the right place.

Aly Conteh, digitisation project manager, looks on his scanners with love. He said: 'The machine's quite capable of turning each page, you could just kick back here and watch them turn, but we wanted to have quick intervention for things like cut pages. You could just have four machines and one operator, but it's a testament to the process we had two books with minor damage out of the 70,000 books we'd seen.'

Is digitising a way of conserving text? Stephen Bury, Head of European and American Collections, said: 'The jury's out. Some people want to see the original book. The feel of it, the size of it. National libraries are looking at whether having an electronic copy increases or decreases physical use, whether the original will be used more if people everywhere can see the scanned version. There are payoffs in accessibility, but then how do you preserve the digital copies? We have a life cycle model for physical assets that we've now applied to the digital world.

'We don't digitise everything. If it's not in good condition we don't digitise it. Typically we would have done it but found another way, so we reduced costs by standardising it. One of the highest costs was deciding what to do. Once you can say "that whole shelf" it's much cheaper.'

'I do still have that sentimental attachment to the feel of a paper book on the beach. I wouldn't like to drop my e-reader in the sea. My other test is how you would give an e-book to a friend. The e-book form is the future though. Students can't carry around all the books they need, although they might want to put them on a laptop instead of a dedicated reader.'

What's the purpose then? The answer, above preservation or the promotion of e-reader hardware, seems to be access. 'The bottom line is that everything is free in the reading rooms. We're conscious that there are lots of costs in sustainability, you have to think of storage over 100 years. What we're planning to do is have a small royalty come back from our partnerships and plough that money back into the project. We're not trying to make money out of it.

'We don't get budget to do digitisation per se, we do little bits when we have a sponsor or something. We've had arrangements with Microsoft, we've worked with a newspaper project available through public libraries. If someone comes along with a nice big cheque book and the conditions aren't restrictive or exclusive we'll talk. Have you got any money?'